Conservative critics of free markets are asking good questions, but their diagnosis of America’s economic challenges and proposed solutions leave much to be desired.
Author: Samuel Gregg (Samuel Gregg)
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Founding Economics and American Conservatism’s Future
Today’s intra-conservative economic debates are about more than present-day economic policy. They also concern the Founding’s saliency for modern American conservatism.
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Ratzinger’s Way
The first of a projected two-volume biography of the theologian-pope underscores his thought’s consistency and how it was shaped by Germany’s twentieth-century traumas.
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Why Corporate America Loves the Left
The leftward drift of many American business executives is driven by both dubious economic calculations and cultural and political pressures that will corrode business’s legitimate freedoms and damage the economy’s capacity to generate wealth.
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Why America Needs Shareholder Capitalism
We must insist on shareholder primacy if we want to hold publicly traded businesses accountable for their distinctive contribution to the common good.
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The Perennial Problem of Executive Power
The republication of Jacques Necker’s On Executive Power in Great States is an occasion to consider that eternal conundrum: how to empower but also limit the executive branch.
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How a Market Liberal Engaged Conservative Thought
Sixty years after its publication in America, Wilhelm Röpke’s “A Humane Economy” remains a model for engaging classical liberal economics with conservative insights into reality.
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The Trouble with Industrial Policy
There are good reasons to believe that industrial policy significantly undermines rather than bolsters the common good.
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Hamiltonianism and the American Nation: A Response to Carson Holloway and Bradford P. Wilson
Carson Holloway and Bradford P. Wilson’s critique of my interpretation of Alexander Hamilton’s place vis-à-vis contemporary American nationalism makes legitimate points but also misreads important features of Hamilton’s thought and the new nationalism.
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Rendering Judgment on America
A new book systematically defends the American Founding against those who believe it was destined to end in nihilism.
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Alexander Hamilton and American Nationalism, in His Time and Ours
Although Alexander Hamilton is regularly invoked by contemporary American nationalists to lend legitimacy to their positions, his nationalism differs significantly from theirs.
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The Great Price of America’s Great Lockdown
We must be clear-eyed about the long-term economic effects of expanding state intervention and temporarily freezing the economy as America battles COVID-19.
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Rethinking Free Markets in an Age of Anxiety
Like their forebears, those who favor market economies need to recalibrate their arguments to address new challenges—including those posed by China.
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The Post-Liberal Right: The Good, the Bad, and the Perplexing
While the post-liberal right often asks good questions, many of its answers are flawed, grounded on mistaken premises, and deeply misleading.
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Markets, the State, and the Imperative of Culture
Free markets and a limited state require a culture of liberty that says “yes” to responsibility and “no” to soft despotism.
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How the Dream of the Great Society Became a Nightmare
A new book about the Great Society should give significant pause to today’s advocates for more government intervention in the economy.
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How Woke Capitalism Corrupts Business
The phenomenon of woke capitalism isn’t only about corporate America succumbing to progressive ideologies. It reflects deep confusion about the purpose of business and how commerce serves the common good.
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How Tocqueville Identified Socialism’s Folly and Capitalism’s Challenge
Alexis de Tocqueville showed that socialism’s errors go far beyond bad economics. But his criticisms should remind today’s advocates of markets that they must promote stronger normative cases for capitalism.
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Venezuela’s Agony, the Catholic Church, and a Post-Maduro Future
Although many are dissatisfied with the Vatican’s efforts to mediate Venezuela’s political crisis, Venezuela’s Catholic Church is the one institution that has retained its integrity throughout two decades of a leftist-populist tyranny. What might this mean for a post-dictatorship Venezuela?
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Putting Adam Smith Back Together
The choices underlying marketplace transactions are more complicated and less narrowly self-regarding than we often suppose. By returning to the full corpus of Adam Smith’s writings, we can escape economistic conceptions of human beings and enhance our understanding of how market economies actually work.
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The Founders’ Natural Rights Philosophy Does Not Entail Radical Autonomy
It’s an error for conservatives to see the American Founding’s emphasis on natural rights as necessarily fostering extreme individualism in contemporary America. Eighteenth-century Americans would have viewed the notion that rights could be exercised contrary to natural law as ridiculous.
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Charles de Gaulle and the Return of the Nation
In an age when supranational technocrats, utopian globalists, leftists contemptuous of patriotism, and tribal populists seem locked in relentless struggle with each other, we need individuals like Charles de Gaulle more than ever.
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Patrick Deneen and the Problem with Liberalism
Patrick Deneen poses good questions but begs others. The second installment in the Public Discourse symposium on Why Liberalism Failed.
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Trump’s Tariffs and Why America Needs a Patriotic Case for Free Trade
While the economic arguments for free trade remain compelling, the political rationale requires a long-overdue overhaul.
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How Europe’s Way of Denial Became a Way of Death
Europe’s immigration woes underscore how much of the continent is living in untruth—in lies that gradually kill.